Dear Friend and Reader:
I have bowed out of participating in the National Polyamory Leadership Summit today and tomorrow. After a lengthy group discussion of confidentiality taking up most of the first evening, I have politely resigned on the grounds of what I will call excess confidentiality. I will not go so far as to say that this is a secret proceeding; it’s too informal for that, and while recording devices have been banned, the meeting is being recorded officially for the Kinsey Institute library. It is also being broadcast to remote participants on the Internet, and every computer in the room is a recording device; so therefore any lack of taping is on the honor system (as it always is here on the digital planet).
My primary objection is this. Some individuals who consider themselves in positions of “national leadership” or even community leadership are doing so under pseudonyms and some feel they cannot reveal their real identities, even if that is off the record. To me this seems odd because the whole point of polyamory is transparency. Presumably that is the only thing that separates it from its cosmic counterpart, cheating.
I know personally nearly everyone in the room; there are a few exceptions. I know friends of most of them, who I trust to vouch for them. So it’s not like I think I’m sitting in a room full of spies. However, I feel passionately that if you are going to put yourself in a position of representing the public, we are all entitled to know who you are, and the things you say belong on the record
The work I do, the positions I take in life and the things that I reveal about myself create certain debilities that might prevent me from participating in certain things, and I don’t participate because either because I cannot, or because I don’t want to get in anyone’s way. I would love to be Barack Obama’s astrologer, but that is probably not a good idea for his sake. My investigative reporting pisses off plenty of people, but I sign my name to it. There are scientists who will not take me seriously as a science reporter because I am also an astrologer, Kepler notwithstanding. I don’t attempt to participate in these things by concealing my true identity or my beliefs
There is a place and time for secrecy, though generally you can be sure that someone who is practicing secrecy has an agenda that is not good for the rest of us. I don’t sense any dark agendas here, though I don’t sense much potential for progress, either. Being polyamorous is about being honest. It’s also about holding others to be honest, and if you want to do that, start with your name. And if you cannot state your name, then step away from the microphone.
I learned on my way out the door that the confidentiality and transparency issues were slugged out behind the scenes for days on end prior to this conversation tonight; and that my closest friends took the same position I am taking, but they need to be here because they organized the summit in the first place. They were extremely sympathetic to my sentiment that everyone involved be willing to place their driver’s license on the table; and that the meeting and conversation be completely transparent. I said out loud tonight that the doors to the room belong open
So, I am out of affinity with this group, and opt to not participate on this level on what are essentially religious grounds. Here in the Quaker state, I am exercising my prerogative as a Quaker.
Back tomorrow with a look ahead at this week’s super interesting astrology, and tonight I look forward into diving into The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. This is a cool book about how the development of written word serves to support the left brain and therefore the supremacy of men and male thinking over women and right brain types of thought process. I think in some odd way I experienced that tonight.
Yours & truly,
V.P. Eric, (very proud). Unable to change my username (it won’t let me!), but just so you all know, I’ll be signing my posts with my real name from now on. Got nothing to hide here…Lots of love, Hazel.
New Political Org: Caucus of Personal Responsibility CPR’ers 🙂 Kristen’s personal soap box for nearly 43 years…
Taking recommendations for color scheme…
David Abram here in SF; comes to Upaya from time to time. Book is amazing – though a bit to read, slow; has a new one coming out, or its out…
Eric: Good for you. Mystes: http://www.lannan.org – they fund some amazing things and host some amazing cosmos relevant talks right here in little ol sf.
At a cafe until next week… gotta run…
Linda (awordedgewise) – that was sort of a revelation! I’ve read that Jesus had a very loving sense of humor, and irony is often misinterpreted when it is in writing!
On the other hand, the male/female balance was considerably off, and still is. Even in the late 1700s women were being burned at the stake for theft, yet the men were allowed to be hanged for the same offense. The newspapers finally started calling it out, saying here we are patting ourselves on the back because we outlawed slavery (England), yet we allow women to be burned at the stake for minor offenses!
Ah yes – history keeps repeating itself. Every generation seems to have a new set of victims and villains.
E writes: “The pretense of “secrecy” for some people involved their employment situation. One person in particular is protecting a high-level job, and others have given similar excuses. I would have been happy to protect her identity under a confidentiality agreement, but I would need to know that identify first.”
It’s just odd that at a “leadership meeting” all parties hadn’t been vetted on the way in. As you said, it wasn’t huge – what, 100 people? And at the countdown: 3, 2, 1 the masks come off, all at once.
Equal vulnerablity, equal protection.
The only job I have ever been fired from was a situation in which two supervisors overheard a discussion in the breakroom about my open relationships, and were scandalized. I went to speak to them individually, and they refused to even touch the subject, citing instead some technical incompetency that was entirely trumped up.
It was weirdly painful. I thought I would be able to handle it, but it took about a 6 months to come out of the spin. But in for a penny, in for a pound. This is where I live, and yes, I can take it with me when I go. *8^D
I don’t think anyone was keeping something secret from their partners. The pretense of “secrecy” for some people involved their employment situation. One person in particular is protecting a high-level job, and others have given similar excuses. I would have been happy to protect her identity under a confidentiality agreement, but I would need to know that identify first.
I think it’s also part of a culture of supposed privacy and where activists wear masks. Can anyone imagine Martin Luther King marching in Selma, with his face covered? Go ahead, call me old-fashioned.
In the New Age scene, of which this is part, you get used to people being called things like Raven Wolf Bear. (I have taken a shamanic name: Francis Skunk Mouse, after two of my totem animals). However, I have reached my tolerance point to this kind of name game.
I reached it years ago on the websites I publish. While it’s impractical to have everyone sign in using a first name and last initial handle (such as on this weblog), I am clear that everyone gets to gave just one identity; and if I ask you who you are, you don’t have to answer, but if you don’t, I reserve the right to delete your identity and all associated posts if I can’t establish your real identity easily. Planet Waves writers publish under their legal names. I am “Eric Francis” but my legal name (Coppolino) appears in the corporate masthead and on my Wikipedia page.
The freedom that comes from using a fake name is freedom without taking responsibility. Yes you get to “say what you want,” but what is the value, if you don’t own your words and your actions? I think that any legitimate activist movement deserves to be held to the same standard. Privacy is a ruse; it is a story we tell ourselves; it is based on fear. There are risks involved in taking part in social progress, and I feel strongly that only people who feel clear enough to be who they are, and to claim being one person belong involved. Plus, I discovered a long time ago that it’s safer, politically and energetically, to simply be who I am.
Can I be anyone else? I don’t think anyone else can, either, and if they want to try, I would like to know why that is.
“Being polyamorous is about being honest”
As is everything we live for (find LIFE in) on this planet.
God Bless You, Eric Francis.
xo
Linda
(OMG! People were there WITHOUT their partners and condoning not naming themselves?? Did I read you right?)
Patty:
re: “114. Simon Peter said to them, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.” Jesus said, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.””
LOL! I do believe this is yet another example of Jesus’ dark humor. For doesn’t he ultimately treat everyone as his equal? Simon Peter was being an a.h. and Our Lord was calling him out on it. Fancy that.
Oh – and Eric – I LOVE the ‘you were putting out male energy thing”. You GO!
I liked the concepts in Spell of the Sensuous, it gave me awareness around how the written word shapes my relationship with the world around me. I have a very bright 4-year old and am struggling with the option of early kindergarten, or letting her continue her time with less structured adventure-in-the-woods daycare.
As for masculinity/femininity… I am reading an amazing book called Wild Feminine – Finding Power, Spirit, and Joy in the Root of the Female Body. It is an excellent resource for restoring creativity through the bowl of the pelvis. It would be healthy for each of us to carry a balance of masculine and feminine energies, and our current culture doesn’t support that.
I’m also facing an opt-out professional situation, so am finding your situation interesting. I do wetland delineations and have been involved in a place where the golf course owners want to cross a creek and a wetland to develop property on the other side. I have so far managed to convince them to avoid the wetlands. Now they have changed their minds and want to cross the wetland and are asking for my help to get through the regulatory permitting process. I feel I need to opt out as well, on the Buddhist grounds of Ahimsa, non-harming. I am not a Buddhist, so I need to find a way to articulate my spiritual inability to do this work.
Thanks for sharing the Quaker wiki – Quaker “Simplicity” clarifies my situation too.
Mostly I am concerned with the scientific accuracy of Shlain’s ideas. I recognize science is a kaleidoscope, though I wonder if we have not come further in brain science than the clear left-right divide. The brain as far as I understand it is a holographic organ…but then if someone can get the memories of the donor along with a liver, we have something else going on as well.
ah, i hope you can get thru it as well. i found it years ago, around the same time as “spell of the sensuous” and they’re part of my dissertation research. i prefer abrams version for similar reasons, it provides a more wholistic perspective. and it’s a bit sexier read, to me at least. 😉
<< I keep wondering if too many men have become female. >>
During my talk Saturday, someone said they “felt a lot of male energy” coming from me. I took this about three different ways, one of them observing that when put in a conference room full of people, I’m going to emphasize a yang, take-charge side. I also observed an expectation that men must somehow become female, and this has been happening for a long time. Watch any video by David Deida and you will see this game he plays with his participants, where he encourages the men to act like men and the women to act like women. Regardless of what you may think of gender roles, it’s entertaining to watch a man step into his maleness and a woman respond to him as if he were male. He also reverses the game and teaches women to be women, which is just as much fun. It makes it clear the extent to which we have blurred gender lines and, while this may seem like a positive step to some, it’s causing a lot of confusion that as a culture we are not addressing consciously.
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Victoria, I mean in the metaphorical sense of being willing to state your legal name in any context where you are taking on public responsibility. This is particularly true in a context when the theme of the issue itself is truth-telling in relationships.
Eric, et alia… If you can get through Goddess and the Alphabet, more power to you. I was tandem reading that along with Spell of the Sensuous a few years ago. Do you know this work? Its writing was supported by a grant from the Lannan Fdtn (Kristen?) in New Mexico. It couldn’t have been published by an academic press at the time. SotS preceded Shlain’s work by about 4 years; is kind of like the ‘other side of the story’ in which David Abram sketches out the same theory, but uses whole brain writing to do it.
The subtitle gives a clue: Perception and Language in the More than Human World. It zips through the origins of egoic-consciousness-through-writing theory, and gets right to the heart of it – how language *otherwise* functions in a weave with the rest of the world, drawing upon the way that contemporary shamans use writing and image to backtrack into another part (whole) of the brain.
Mystes~ I am ticking off the letter C option. I often “marvel” at the attempts made to denigrate women.
I hope I’ve been a more enlightened man.
Yeah, I’ve read it in various sections of the Nag H too. A bunch o Lamas have mouthed that idiocy in the Tibetan/Indian yogic traditions as well. I get it. Anyone stupid enough to say that women should become men can’t possibly be a spiritual mentor.
They’re just jealous. It’s DIY from here, kiddos. What the half-husband calls “Gurutech” is over.
But honestly, given MM’s intimacy with Yeshua, I doubt seriously the ‘become as men’ garbage is anything but a) bad translation b) apocrypha or c) the House of Peter running roughshod over the Marian mysteries.
M
Eric, good for you.
Speaking of men over women. In the Gospel of Thomas (gnostic gospels) is the following statement (some people think it was added later)
114. Simon Peter said to them, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.”
Jesus said, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
I keep wondering if too many men have become female.
Speaking of religion, the religious historian Elaine Pagels avers that Yeshua said that the keys to heaven were two: Don’t lie, and Do not do what you hate.
Don’t lie. And do not do what you hate.
Don’t lie. And do not do what I hate.
Is it just me, or is that painfully simple? Heaven. Right there, between speaking truth and doing it.
rule of thumb: I never ask anyone else to do something I wouldn’t do.
Handing over my driver’s license. That’s like handing over my identity to the group. Not exactly individuating.